National News

Benghazi Whistleblower Says He Was Smeared

The Benghazi whistleblower whose new book details massive security failures in the run-up to the September 11, 2012 attacks denies he wrote an incident report made public this week that undermines key details in his memoir.

The debate over the Obama administration’s actions before and after the attack on the U.S. mission was reignited following an Oct. 2760 Minutes report featuring an interview with Morgan Jones, a pseudonym for a British security contractor who trained and advised the local Libyan guard force for the U.S. mission in Benghazi. Jones’s book, The Embassy House, was released two days later and contains a firsthand account of his time in Benghazi and his actions during the series of attacks that resulted in the death of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens.

Controversy over Jones’s interview and book reached a high pitch on Oct. 31 when The Washington Postpublished details of an incident report allegedly written by Jones that contradicts the account in his book and reveals his real name, Dylan Davies.

The four-page indicent report, obtained by The Daily Beast, has not been previously published. A State Department official confirmed it matches the version sent to the U.S. government by Davies’s then-employer Blue Mountain Group, the private security company based in Britain, on Sept. 14, 2012, and subsequently provided to Congressional committees investigating the Benghazi attacks.

In an interview Saturday with The Daily Beast, Davies said he did not write the incident report, nor had he ever seen it.

“I am just a little man against some big people here,” Davies said. “They can do things, make up things, anything they want, I wouldn’t stand a chance.” Davies said he did not know who leaked the report to the Post but said he suspected it was the State Department, an allegation that could not be independently corroborated. “It would not be difficult to do,” Davies said. “I knew I was going to come in for a lot of flack and you know mud slinging, so yeah I’d say it was them, but I can’t be sure.”

The State Department has declined to comment on Jones’s book or his 60 Minutes interview.

The Blue Mountain Group incident report is written in the first person in the voice of Davies. The version of the document obtained by The Daily Beast is not signed by anyone. It contains two stamps at the top: one of the Blue Mountain Group and one that reads “Embassy of the United States of America.”

The incident report differs from the version of events told in Davies’s book The Embassy Houseand by Davies in his 60 Minutes interview in several significant ways. It also differs from the accounts that Davies gave to the FBI and various other U.S. agencies in the wake of the attack, Davies said.

Both Davies’s book and his 60 Minutes interview have Davies and his driver attempting to drive to the U.S. mission in Benghazi from Davies’s villa about 30 minutes after the initial attack on the compound began but failing to reach the compound due to roadblocks set up by a local jihadist militia known as Ansar al-Sharia.

But the incident report states that Davies then returned to his villa, rather than traveling to the hospital as he claims in the book. In the report, Davies learned of the ambassador’s death from a Blue Mountain Group guard who had gone to the hospital and taken a photo of the ambassador’s body. In the book, however, Davies recounts in detail his trip to the hospital where he saw the body himself.

In the report, Davies remained at his villa until the next morning, when he visited the ruins that remained of the compound. In the book, Davies tells a harrowing tale of his late-night visit to the compound, where he claims he scaled a 12-foot-wall, killed an extremist with the butt of his rifle, saw that the compound had been totally destroyed, and then escaped and returned to his villa.

Each account has Davies visiting the compound the morning of Sept. 12, during which he took 25 photos of the burnt-out buildings. (Click here to see nine of the photos.)